Many customers grumbled about the Netgear equipment, which Virgin Media described in February as an "exclusive" and custom-made piece of hardware intended "to provide you with killer performance and wonderful ease of use".

Since then, several firmware updates have been applied to the router/modem combo boxes.

The ISP toldThe Register last month that a key new feature requested by many customers was delayed while the tech team worked on the various performance problems reported by users.

That included a memory leak cock-up in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless drivers that forced users to repeatedly reboot the SuperHub. Virgin Media claimed the glitch had now been fixed in the latest update.

The company said it had made four channels available under 5GHz.

It warned that "5GHz performance can vary as although it handles interference from other wireless routers better than 2.4GHz, its ability to penetrate walls, doors etc is less."

The company added: "We also recommend you site your SuperHub away from central heating radiators, foil-backed wall board and plasma screen TVs if you're using wireless, as these items have been known to cause issues leading to poor wireless performance."

As of last night, a function to allow punters to run their SuperHub in so-called "modem mode" is finally available, so that users can link it up with other networking hardware – such as a separate router, for example, to handle port filtering.

A Virgin Media spokesman told us that there "will be further updates if issues still persist, as well as additional new features depending on what customers request and what will be possible". ®